Getting Started with Amazon QuickSight

Written by Brian Smithwick Updated over a week ago

Access to the ServiceTrade Data Warehouse with Amazon QuickSight is available only to ServiceTrade Enterprise customers. For more information about ServiceTrade Enterprise, contact sales@servicetrade.com.

Amazon QuickSight is a low-cost, high-performance business intelligence and reporting tool. By leveraging ServiceTrade's integration with QuickSight, managers, owners, and business analysts can gain insights into customer service data.

Connecting to Amazon QuickSight

Important - please read first:

Access to your Data Warehouse for use with Amazon QuickSight is available only to Enterprise customers. More information about ServiceTrade Enterprise is available here.

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud application and tool that is separate from your ServiceTradeaccount. You will need first to sign up for an Amazon QuickSight account and log into it before being able to move your ServiceTrade data into it.

Contact ServiceTrade support at support@servicetrade.com to receive your ServiceTrade Data Warehouse username/schema and password. This information is specifically for connecting ServiceTrade to QuickSight after you have logged in to the application and is not your account name or password to log into Amazon's QuickSight services.

Connecting to the data warehouse

Your ServiceTrade data is made available to QuickSight through an Amazon Redshift data warehouse. To use QuickSight to create reports and visualizations from your ServiceTrade data, you will need to connect your QuickSight account to your data warehouse. The initial connection process will connect QuickSight to your data warehouse and allow you to access any and all ServiceTrade data warehouses going forward.

Log into QuickSight

Click ‘Manage Data’

Click ‘New Data Set’

Click ‘Redshift (manual connect)’

Enter the following:

Data source name: ServiceTrade Data Warehouse

Database server: redshift-1.servicetrade.com

Port: 5439

Database name: main

Username (schema): <your assigned data warehouse username>

Password: <your assigned data warehouse password>

Click ‘Validate Connection’ to confirm connection parameters

Click ‘Create data source’

Choose the schema that you were assigned

Choose the data source table that you want to visualize, such as ‘jobs’. (You can create additional data sources for other tables later)

Click ‘Directly query your data’

Click ‘Edit/Preview data’

If desired, change the name of the data source, then click ‘Save’

Adding more data source tables

Log into QuickSight

Click ‘Manage Data’

Click ‘New Data Set’

In ‘Existing data sources’, click the data source you created when originally setting up QuickSight (such as 'ServiceTrade Data Warehouse')

Click ‘Create data set’

Choose the schema that you were assigned

Choose the data source table that you want to visualize

Click ‘Directly query your data’

Click ‘Edit/Preview data’

If desired, change the name of the data source, then click ‘Save’

Repeat this process for each additional data source table that you want to visualize.

Refreshing a data source table

ServiceTrade may periodically add new columns to your data warehouse tables. To gain access to those new columns, you will need to refresh your data source table.

Log into QuickSight

Click ‘Manage Data’

Cick the data set to be refreshed

Click ‘Edit data set’

See that the new columns are available in the list of fields on the left

Click ‘Save’

Note: It is NOT necessary to refresh your data source tables to get updated data (new jobs, invoices, etc) from ServiceTrade -- that data will be updated automatically on a set schedule. Manually refreshing a data source table is only needed to gain access to new columns of data in your data warehouse.

Please review this article for more information about the specific fields included in each data warehouse dataset.

Alternate BI Tools

You may choose to visualize your data with a business intelligence tool other than Amazon QuickSight (such as Domo or Power BI). If so, your BI tool will need to support PostgreSQL connections. The instructions above should provide enough information for you to configure your BI tool. Please note the following:

ServiceTrade provides support only for Amazon QuickSight. Other BI tools are not officially supported.

You will need to provide ServiceTrade with a static IP address from which your BI tool will connect to your ServiceTrade data warehouse.